Dangerously Addicted

Oil is cheap right now, but we’re importing more of it than ever, and as a direct result, our nation remains more at risk today than yesterday. Our only choice is to kick it. Just kick it! Breaking our addiction to oil is essential, and the time to face our country’s dangerous addiction is now.

As a nation, our addiction to oil is so strong that we may not even be aware of how much we actually consume: we drink and eat oil (in the form of preservatives and additives in our foods and beverages, and in flecks ofTeflon from nonstick pans). We slather it on our bodies when we use personal care products manufactured with oil, and we wear it in our clothing made of oil-based chemicals. We buy toys made with oil, and we fuel our cars and transportation choices with too much of it—even if it costs less at the moment.

We can compare our addiction to oil to that of heroin. Can you imagine a heroin addict saying that the only problem with his addiction is the price of the drug? The problem is the drug.

Petroleum is the world’s drug. The world is addicted to oil.

Snap out of it and wake up! Splash some cold water on your face, people of planet Earth!

Until we stop using the drug, we’re going to experience the unhealthy consequences of addiction. We can’t continue to live in denial. It is too dangerous. Acknowledging the truth is the first step to recovery. What are the consequences of oil addiction?

One especially dangerous side effect is that we are funding dictators and rogue regimes in the Middle East, South America, Africa, and elsewhere when we buy foreign oil, or “black gold.” In 1970, America imported 24 percent of its oil, while today we import at least 70 percent of the oil we use, spending about two billion dollars daily on foreign oil from regimes that loathe us. As we spend the projected trillions of dollars per decade buying oil, we are taking part in the biggest exchange of wealth in the history of humankind by funneling some hundreds of billions of dollars annually into the economies of other nations and hostile groups that stand ready to destroy the basic principles of liberty and justice that we hold so dear. Pentagon officials believe that oil resources could be at the heart of international tensions for years to come and predict an age of resource wars emerging with China, Russia, Europe and America in a dangerously volatile scramble for the rest of the globe’s fossil fuel reserves.

Drilling for oil domestically won’t ease international tensions over an increasingly scarce resource, especially if our supply is not sufficient to shift our nation into a green and renewable energy-based economy.

But going green and developing alternative, renewable energy sources is something we can do. Vice-president Al Gore has led the charge to make this shift within a decade. Kevin Sweeney of the Alliance for Climate Protection, the group founded by Al Gore, says that a combination of smart shopping, conservation, solar, wind, geothermal and innovation could supply all of our energy needs. At the very least, we could blunt our increasing demand and help to diffuse growing global tensions by transforming as much of our economy as possible into renewable energy that transcends oil.

Imagine transforming ourselves into a green economy and obtaining 100 percent of our energy needs from non-polluting petroleum-free renewable energy! Our skies would be cleaner. Our health would be better, individually and as a nation. Many millions of new “green” collar jobs would be created for people as sheet metal workers and pipe fitters—good paying jobs requiring a renaissance of newly manufactured materials. Our world would no longer fund nor worry about Middle Eastern oil.

Thanks to wind and other renewable energy projects currently underway, hundreds of thousands of workers are now being employed in newly created non-polluting green collar jobs throughout the world. This number will continue to increase if we promote smart policies aimed at curbing our oil addiction and addressing its resultant problems, like pollution and disease—many petroleum-derived chemicals cause cancer.

One example, ethylene oxide, a chemical derived from oil and used in almost all shampoos, is known to cause human cancer and leaves traces of its cancer-causing byproduct, 1,4-dioxane, in many products. This increases everybody’s cancer risk, but especially that of children who are bathed in products containing this carcinogen.

How can we continue to let oil cause cancer in our children? Studies show that oil-based chemicals such as pesticides used in our homes and gardens can cause leukemia and malignant brain tumors in young children. Many petrochemicals, once in the human body, act like the female hormone estrogen. These xenoestrogens exert cancer-causing and toxic reproductive effects by overloading the body with high levels of chemicals that mimic the most dangerous forms of estrogen and causing reproductive harm in our offspring. These chemicals are one reason why rates of missing testicles in boys and testicular cancer, as well as male infertility, have been or are currently at record highs throughout Europe and America.

And, then, of course, there is global warming.

Many experts have linked emissions from fossil fuels to our increasingly warming environment. Although not everybody agrees, one thing is clear: we will obtain so many other benefits by kicking the oil habit that even if we are wrong about global warming, we will have still won. And if the experts who have linked human activity to warming temperatures and climate change are right, well, then we will have averted a catastrophe. When we kick the oil habit, we win. That’s why it is so important to get started today!

To learn more about the Green Patriot environmental movement and all things Green Patriot be sure to visit www.greenpatriot.us as well as www.greenpatriotradio.com and www.greenpatriotposters.org.